The 1968 Olympics Black Power Salute

US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists on the world stage at the 1968 Olympics - their Black Power salute would become one of the most influential protest images of all time.

In an HBO documentary, Smith said that they were trying to bring attention to injustice in the United States. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smith described their protest as a cry for freedom and human rights.

It was 16 October, 1968. Smith had just won gold, and Carlos had won bronze in a 200-metre sprint at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. 

Smith and Carlos carefully planned intricate details of their protest together. Before stepping out, they each removed a running shoe to protest poverty in the US. In black socks, they made their way across the stadium grass to the stand. They walked slowly with hands clasped behind their backs as if in mourning, each holding their running shoe.

“I looked at my feet in my high socks and thought about all the black poverty I’d seen from Harlem to East Texas,” Carlos would later write. To protest lynchings of black people, Smith and Carlos wore a scarf and a long string of beads. “I fingered my beads and thought about the pictures I’d seen of the ‘strange fruit’ swinging from the poplar trees of the South,” wrote Carlos.

When ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ began to play, Smith lowered his head and raised his right fist. Carlos raised his left.

Australian sprinter Peter Norman had won silver and was also part of the protest. Norman wore a small badge on his chest: “Olympic Project for Human Rights,” which had been organised to protest racism in sports. It was Norman who had suggested Smith and Carlos share the pair of gloves, when one of them had forgotten them. This is why Smith is raising his right fist, and Carlos is raising his left.

In that moment, the crowd went silent. As the anthem played, spectators booed and screamed the anthem. Punishment was swift, with Smith and Carlos ordered to leave the Olympic stadium. 

But that moment made history as an incendiary act of protest by athletes, an icon of the Black Power movement, and an emotional reference point in taking a knee.